Traditionally, many individuals have entrusted their financial plans to personal financial advisors. But today, more and more individuals are taking their financial destiny into their own hands and playing a more active role in planning and achieving their financial goals.
Increasingly, these individuals rely on computer-based systems that organize their financial assets and liabilities and further provide them with a summary of their financial health. However, financial modeling systems require a great deal of data input and users become discouraged by the tediousness of the task. Furthermore, these systems tend to focus on the administrative aspects of financial planning without enabling the user to make reasoned choices about their financial futures. Also, these systems are limited by their inability to dynamically analyze the user's financial goals. These limitations are counterproductive to the user's needs to develop and manage an integrated personal financial plan from an executive decision-making perspective.
Most existing financial management systems do little more than to allow users to electronically organize their financial assets and liabilities. These systems typically focus on presenting the user with a transactional summary of their financial health. However, these systems fail to capture the user's financial intentions and expectations about their future. Furthermore, these systems typically rely on the users to continually update their personal financial data. As a result, these systems are merely data-driven calculators that are incapable of providing the user with meaningful financial advice tailored to their financial intentions and expectations.
Similarly, some financial management systems present a static view of the user's financial health. These systems typically require the user to provide the most current financial data relating to their financial assets and liabilities. Consequently, when the user wishes to develop or update their financial plan, the user must input their most recent financial information. This problem is further exacerbated by the fact that these systems demand a lot of typing and guessing when the user enters their financial data. This process is time-consuming and inefficient and does not promote an intuitive understanding of how complex financial variables interact to produce a sensible financial plan.
Furthermore, most systems lack full interactivity. The user can only interact with the system. If there is need to communicate with a live advisor, he has to do so outside the confines of the system. Automated coaching beyond simple “how to use” menus are another important ingredient in making a financial system useful and flexible.
No system currently exists that combines the ease of use of an interactive and a dynamic graphical user interface with the abilities of a high power financial modeling system. In today's investment market, more and more users are acting as their own financial advisor. Therefore there is also a need for a financial system that combines a high power financial modeling tool with ease of use, context sensitive coaching, and interactivity with a live advisor, allowing the to assume an executive decision making role in managing their financial life.